The theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli

• A. Cannon-Bard theory of emotion
• B. Schachter-Singer theory of emotion
• C. High road emotions
• D. James-Lange theory of emotion

Answer: (D)

The main idea here is that emotional experience comes from perceiving your own physiological responses. When you encounter something emotion-provoking, your body responds with changes like a faster heartbeat, sweaty palms, or trembling. Your brain then interprets these bodily cues as the emotion you’re feeling. So the emotion is essentially the perception of arousal, not the trigger of arousal. This is the idea behind James-Lange: we feel fear because we notice we’re trembling, not we tremble because we’re afraid. It differs from Cannon-Bard, which argues arousal and emotion happen together and independently; from Schachter-Singer, which says mood arises from arousal plus cognitive labeling; and from the higher-order processing view, which emphasizes cortical processing shaping the emotional experience.